We’ve just seen a major new airline partnership announced in India, as IndiGo is partnering with Delta, Air France-KLM, and Virgin Atlantic.
There’s nothing terribly surprising here — IndiGo already partnered with Air France-KLM and Virgin Atlantic, and in 2024, Delta CEO Ed Bastian even revealed the airline planned to partner with IndiGo. However, the overall cohesive strategy behind the partnership is noteworthy.
Anyway, in this post I want to cover one of the most significant aspects of this announcement, which is that Delta has announced its return to India… sort of.
Delta will operate an Atlanta to Delhi route, eventually
Details are really limited so far, but Delta has announced that it plans to resume services to India with nonstop flights between Atlanta (ATL) and Delhi (DEL), subject to government approval. When will the route launch? Well, “the service start date will be announced later.”
At 7,945 miles, this would be one of Delta’s longest routes (and possibly the longest in terms of distance flown, given airspace closures).
For context, Delta is currently the only one of the “big three” US carriers not to fly to India. Delhi is currently served by American out of New York (JFK), and by United out of Newark (EWR). United had a much bigger India network going back some time, but Russian airspace closures have limited the viability of some of these routes, particularly for service to Mumbai (BOM).
Delta most recently launched service to India as of late 2019. Specifically, the airline flew from New York to Mumbai with Boeing 777-200LRs. However, that service lasted for all of several weeks, before it was pulled. Not only did the pandemic shut down global travel, but Delta also retired its Boeing 777 fleet, which was the plane capable of operating this route nonstop, without taking any sort of a payload restriction.
If we really want to go down memory lane, prior to the 2019 service relaunch, Delta last flew to India from 2006 until 2009. That service was from Atlanta to Mumbai, but executives at the airline claimed the service was no longer sustainable due to Middle Eastern carriers.
When will Delta actually launch flights to India?
It’s not often you see airlines announce that they’ll launch a route, without providing any sense of when it will happen. Delta is known for this — it’s like the route announcement equivalent of Lufthansa’s 2017 announcement of its new Allegris business class.
In fairness to Delta, the company’s CEO has made the strategy pretty clear. In 2024, Bastian clarified that Delta planned to return to India in 2026, though didn’t name the route at the time.
Delta’s strategy seems to be to wait for delivery of the Airbus A350-1000, as the airline has 20 of these on order. Now, the question is when those planes will start to join the fleet. Delta was supposed to get its first plane in 2025, but that has now been delayed to 2026.
The A350-1000 is an amazing jet, in terms of unit costs and range, so it’s the perfect plane for serving India without payload restrictions. Then again, there should be nothing preventing Delta from flying its A350-900s to India, at least the more premium ones, which are a bit lighter. However, perhaps the plane is too premium for the route, in terms of demand profile.
Bottom line
Delta has revealed plans to return to India, by launching a route from Atlanta to Delhi. This announcement comes as part of a larger agreement with IndiGo, whereby Delta will finally have a proper partner in India.
We don’t yet know when the route will launch, but based on past comments from Delta’s CEO, it seems like the service will only start once the airline takes delivery of the Airbus A350-1000.
What do you make of Delta’s return to India?
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